Danny Horta-Darrington (Flatiron) has been working with Adrian Price-Whelan (Flatiron) to measure things about abundances and dynamics of stars in the Milky Way disk. Horta is finding that there are way better abundance gradients, in way more directions in phase space, than previously have been (usefully) visualized. But along the way, he stumbled upon a plot that clearly shows the variation of the Milky Way thin disk density with radius. We discussed today how to make the simplest possible measurement of this, with a variation of Orbital Torus Imaging, or really a simplification of it. We realized today that there is enough data to just make this measurement in patches all over the (nearby) disk. The scale length looks short!
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